Perspectives on Healing and Personal Transformation Through BDSM

From the complementary perspectives of a top and a submissive, we, Daemonum X and Sara Elise, work together frequently to explore queer BDSM as an alternative healing modality and as a way to reclaim our personal pleasure, sensuality, and sexuality. As queer femme women, and Sara Elise as a survivor and a woman of color, our collective work and practice consistently aims to straddle the line between objectification and agency. We find strength in rejecting mainstream standards of sexuality, beauty, and respectability, which exist even within the BDSM community.

We created the following photo series, featuring Sara Elise tied by Daemonum X, with fetish photographer Lanee Bird to capture the practice of bondage as part of a larger conversation about liberation. These photos are part of an ongoing project to queer traditional erotica by featuring bodies in rope bondage that are not normally represented in mainstream erotic photos. The beauty of these photos is that they stand alone as powerful mirrors of our own alternative sexualities. Below are our experiences with healing and transformation through BDSM to provide additional context to this project.

Lanee Bird

Daemonum X:

I began tying as a sort of frivolous exploration of bedroom bondage. What I didn’t know then was that first piece of rope, acquired from the hardware store, would launch my life in a completely unpredictable direction. My identity as a leatherdyke, a sadist, and a dominant grew as a result of cultivating my rope practice. I would spend several nights each week practicing on myself, in what I came to know as a form of sensual meditation. Self-tying was a means to regularly pour erotic energy and intention into myself, and with this practice came a shift in how I moved through the world — a form of sex magic. I was vibrating at a higher frequency.

As a sadist, I primarily saw rope as a medium for pain-giving and my expectations didn’t reach too far beyond that when it came to tying others. The singularity of this intention, too, was naive. I had been a student of pain for quite some time before I learned that sharing experiences of pain breeds incredible intimacy. The intimacy of suffering, of one person willingly offering up their pain as a gift to another, is a special form of connection I have come to cherish and prioritize.

There is a pattern to the way many bottoms (that I have tied) explain their experiences in rope. They tell me about using physical pain to release emotional pain, using restraints to feel free, and using submission to feel strong. I have found that bondage, unlike any other medium, holds currency in irony. It brings me pleasure to use pain to facilitate and hold space for these experiences. I love nothing more than to cut through curves with my rope, forming a new structure of my liking. I love to witness the unique ways each bottom processes pain, and watch the sweet release as they move through it. I love showing bottoms the photos I have taken of them after they are back on the ground following a suspension, when their faces light up with disbelief in their own capacity. In receiving consensual pain, it is essential to trust and be trusted, which is perhaps the most intimate of all.

Now, I am drawn primarily to other queers who see BDSM as I do — inspiring, transforming, a container for the shadow self. In our society, many of us who exist on the margins are encouraged to shrink ourselves and never talk about our needs. Queer sexuality, when it’s not completely erased, is policed and stifled. At its core, BDSM forces us to share our desires, to deeply negotiate those desires, to plan for how we want to engage with them, and even what happens after. For myself and many others who have had traumatic sexual histories, normalizing communication around desire and consent is incredibly healing. Playing in the shadows forces us to release parts of ourselves we have hidden and become less fractured wholes. I like to approach each rope session with the intention that the energy we raise works at our collective shame and moves us a little farther into the light.

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Lanee BirdLanee Bird

Sara Elise:

Therapy has never been very effective for me. Whenever I’m in a session, I always find myself spending the bulk of my time either psychoanalyzing the therapist based on their body language, the questions they’ve asked me, or their reactions to my answers; or overexplaining the nuances of my thought processes because of responses they’ve given me that would imply they’ve misunderstood almost everything.

Over the course of my life, I’ve met with a myriad of “mental health professionals” and have heard the words “ADHD,” “anxiety,” “obsessive compulsive disorder,” “multiple personality disorder,” “post-traumatic stress disorder,” and “schizophrenia” discussed as potential diagnoses of all of the things I feel in my mind. But I have self-diagnosed it as “crazy brain” — when my mind is quick-moving but molasses-sticky, impenetrable and heavy, void of reason, painful, and dark; when it feels like I want to claw my eyes out or stab myself in the face. After careful consideration of each option, I’ve refused to be hospitalized or put on medication, and instead, for the past six or so years, I have focused on using natural remedies to ease the symptoms I feel- incorporating the use of gym time, essential oils, sex, and medicinal teas and tinctures into my personal self-care routine.

While these remedies work for my mental health maintenance, nothing has worked quite as well in alleviating said “crazy brain” as having my body tightly bound in scratchy rope with a hood over my face blocking out most of my senses as my top either firmly gives me directions or runs sharp knives down my legs and arms. As the philosopher Kant said, it’s clear that my solution is to “deny knowledge, to allow room for faith.”

It has only been through BDSM as a practice that I’ve realized that the ultimate healing first comes from destruction of everything you think you are. Poet Cynthia Occelli wrote, “For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out, and everything changes. To someone who doesn’t understand growth, it would look like complete destruction.” I finally feel like I’m removing all the masks and all the pretenses that we’re taught to hold onto in our bodies and in our minds. This art of consensual submission has taught me to learn how to surrender my ego, insecurities, fear, and vanity to a deepening of pleasure, service, intimacy, and vulnerability in the present moment.

BDSM play breaks me in a way that allows me to be fully present, open, and flowing — the best version of myself. So much of what our culture teaches us about growth and expansion is based on socially-constructed norms, but wouldn’t it make more sense if each of us took control of dictating what growth looks like for our own selves? Instead of feeding into the power dynamics and blatant misogyny that our society deems acceptable, wouldn’t it instead make sense to question, disfigure, and dismantle those, and decide which power dynamics we want to consensually play with instead?

After a session where I’ve been painfully suspended in the air by rope, I feel capable and proud of my ability to flow and fly. After being paddled and made to count out loud each impact on my upper thighs, I feel stronger and more present in my body. After having needles pierce my skin to draw blood, I feel more desired and beautiful than I did before. When my muscles are sore and I have scars or bruises the next day, I feel whole and like my outsides finally match my insides; like I’ve taken off the unnecessary social masks and am instead wearing my “crazy brain” in the daylight for people to see.

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It’s only when our masks are challenged and tousled that they can finally be torn down, allowing what was once covered in darkness to finally be exposed to light. And only when the darkness reaches the light can we finally begin to heal.

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